Bengaluru: The recent downpour, accompanied by high speed winds, which caused widespread toppling of trees and electric poles has acted as a wake up call for civic agencies such as BBMP and Bescom. While BBMP has decided to take up a survey to identify weak and decaying tress, Bescom plans to go for underground cabling in areas having dense vegetation.
Though civic experts had mooted underground cabling of power lines to avoid frequent outages and electrocution risks due to damage of electric poles and cables, the government was going slow due to high costs. Going underground would cost Bescom five times more than overhead cable. However, in recent years, the government has carried out underground cabling of HT (11 KV) in various parts of the city and soon LT cable will be placed underground in select places.
Bescom MD Pankajkumar Pandey said it will seek more funds in the coming budget to take up underground cabling, especially in areas with dense tree cover. “We will take up the underground cabling in the areas where tree cover is more. These are the areas which are largely affected during the tree fall. However the government is now keen on taking cables underground and we are demanding substantial funding for the purpose. Till the end of March, underground cabling has been done for 5,558 mts of HT line and 16,227 mts of LT cable,” he said.
Pandey also pointed out that large numbers of softwood trees, which were planted in Bengaluru few years ago, was taking a toll on electric poles and wires. “We need trees which can withstand the local weather conditions. We are holding talks with the BBMP to begin a survey to identify the decaying trees, so that the damage to electric wires is minimised,” he said.
The BBMP officials admitted that trees such as Gulmohar and Rain Trees, which are present in large numbers in city, were most vulnerable to during strong winds. “Most of the tree plantings in city were taken up during early 90s and no fresh planting was done after that. Hence we must assess the age and quality of the present trees so that the weak ones could be removed for public safety,” said a BBMP official.
